The World Single Distance Championships scheduled for March 9-11 may still take place in Salt Lake City on schedule. Almost 1,000 yards of concrete will be repoured to try to fix the foundation of the 2002 Olympic speedskating oval. Layton Construction paid for the demolition and the concrete, after it agreed with Salt Lake Olympic organizers that the only solution was to tear up the track foundation and start again.
Athens 2004 organizers are close to an agreement with Manolo Romero’s International Sports Broadcasting in which the company would be the host TV broadcaster of the Olympics. National broadcasters throughout the world will pay the International Olympic Committee for the rights to broadcast the Games. NBC has already acquired 2004 rights for the United States. The agreement is expected to be initialed in the next few days and will be sent to the IOC for approval before being signed.
Organizers of Athens 2004 Games are launching a volunteer campaign in January to get more Greeks involved and make them aware that the Games are for everyone. The big problem for organizers is how to find tens of thousands of volunteers in a country with no history of volunteerism.
Russian Olympic head Vitaly Smirnov is assuring the International Olympic Committee that Moscow is a safe city to host the International Olympic Committee session, which will elect a new IOC president as well as the host city for the 2008 Summer Games. Hundreds of IOC and international sports federations’ members and several thousand foreign media and guests will attend the 112th annual session of the IOC. On Tuesday gunmen wounded Moscow’s deputy Mayor and killed his driver in broad daylight.
Anita De Frantz, first vice-president of the International Olympic Committee, has apologized for giving athletes a written quiz on the history and protocol of the Olympic movement. The recently-elected athlete members of the IOC were insulted when De Frantz handed them a written nine-point questionnaire asking, among other things, who founded the modern Olympics and who was the first IOC president.
And finally, Beijing is attracting its citizens to its bid for the 2008 Games by airing a three-episode comedy series on television stations in 133 cities around China during the Chinese Spring Festival in January. The series will star ten Olympic Gold medallists and 20 movie stars popular in China. It depicts a number of interesting incidents that are supposed to happen in the process of bidding for the Olympic Games.
